Category Archives: fun

7:00 pm – Everyone was assembled in the conference room, their scripts at the ready. Again I got that sinking feeling that I was in over my head. I stared out at the group and my mind raced for something clever to say, but I had nothing. I pressed forward despite my fears and began the reading. It was a very humbling experience to have several talented people travel various distances to perform and be judged by me.

Who am I to judge them? Sure, I have this script and an idea in my mind of how I want it to come to life on film. How can I tell them they’re doing it wrong or it should be done like this. I suppose that’s what I am learning a director does. Sounds simple enough and with time and experience I am sure other directors take it for granted. It just feels, odd out of place for me to tell someone else how to do something when I am so flawed.

Thankfully everyone involved in this project is very accommodating and they have made the experience worthwhile. I know they can see me stumble and ramble sometimes. They politely wait and add their wisdom were its needed. For that I am grateful. I just have to keep telling myself this is my first project as a director I am allowed to fumble around a bit, I really hope it gets easy because I love the potential of it all.

We are down to 8 days left in the funding campaign. Visit our site to sponsor us and take home a box of crazy loot!

In just a few hours I will be meeting with three of the actors for the upcoming film Last Days. This core if you will, represents the main speaking parts of the film. There will be a few smaller speaking parts and around a dozen extras on the set. Tonight we will go over the dialog beginning to end.

All of the actors have seen the script and its many revisions. I have have not been in the same room with them however and this will be a great delight to see how they interrupt my words. I am very excited about this process, it marks another achievement in my pursuit to understand the process of film creation. I am very fortunate to have these actors involved, each is very popular in the local community.

I will post some video from the table read Tuesday night to give everyone a peek inside the production.

If you have not see it, check out our funding page on Indiegogo. We have only 9 days left in the campaign, don’t miss out on the sweet loot you can get as a sponsor!

It has been a struggle the past few days to post anything to the blog. Many little things have happened. Its not that I was waiting to compile them into a bigger post, its been difficult to convince myself to write anything. I am a private person by habit and I really don’t get all this facetweetblogging stuff. Even now with the film project up and running, I have something to share, but its not a natural compulsion.

I eagerly want to keep a steady flow of material on the site to not only boost awareness of my funding project, but to share my experience making this film. Each time I approached the idea of a new blog I stared at the blinking cursor for several minutes, then abandoned the effort some trivial passive activity. Tonight I finally forced myself to write even though its 1 am and I have to be up at 8 am tomorrow for work. The words are starting to flow so enough the the psycho babble…

Tonight we attempted to shoot the Longevity prequel. I spent a few hours today working on mock articles for a journal the main character uses to tell the story of his past and present. Time was quickly running out and I scrambled to do a few last minute errands to get ready for filming. Naturally as my DP keeps telling me “things go wrong!”, and they did. I recently moved and set up my printer only to find that the data cable was missing. I had know idea where it could be so I raced to my storage shed and wracked my brain while I nearly unpacked the whole thing. 45 minutes later, the shooting deadline rapidly approaching I abandoned all hope of finding the cable. Read the rest of this entry →

Just got back from my first film crew gig. I joined a team of local film makers lead by Jason Hunt to create a short for the 48 hour film project. Ten teams participated in the Kansas City event that kicked off at the Screenland in the Crown Center shopping mall.

Team leads picked genres from a hat as the event started. We initially ended up with Western or Musical, which seemed like a cool, but possibly complicated genre for the short time we had. Other teams recieved Sci Fi, Superhero and Noir to name a few. Our team lead opted to turn in our genre and take a chance with a redraw. We ended up with Family movie, a fairly broad topic.

Once genres had been selected we got the final elements, a character and a line of dialogue. The character was “Sam or Samantha Tangent, Animal Therapist. Then the line we needed to incorporate which was…”Is that clear? Any questions?” With all the elements we headed downstairs into the food court to brainstorm out ideas. In about 40 minutes we hashed out a pretty funny concept. We broke there and Jason was tasked with hammering out a script before midnight. He delivered a funny draft with memorable characters.Read the rest of this entry →